China and Russia have learned well from failed U.S. promises
History shows Beijing and Moscow cannot always trust what Washington says
After the West’s broken promises, including pledges not to expand NATO's influence into Russia’s buffer states, Russian and Chinese leaders are no longer inclined to believe their assurances of peaceful intentions. | SPUTNIK / KREMLIN / VIA REUTERS
Japantimes
Western analysts fear a failure to check Russia’s revanchist ambitions will serve to embolden China in the axis of autocracies. On Feb. 4, on the opening day of the Winter Olympics in Beijing that was boycotted by Western diplomats, Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin declared a “no limits” partnership and backed each other on Ukraine and Taiwan.
A second narrative holds that increased U.S. military presence will reassure NATO allies and check Russian belligerence, but only at the cost of distracting America from the bigger strategic challenge of China in the Indo-Pacific, most imminently in Taiwan.
Given China’s dramatic expansion of military might and economic strength, U.S. promises to defend Taiwan against attack might prove hollow.
A fall of Taiwan would vastly complicate U.S. efforts to help defend Japan and others on the one hand, while greatly enlarging China’s scope to project power closer to U.S. and allied territories on the other.
An alternative narrative is that the biggest lessons China has drawn are from the history of U.S. policies after the end of the Cold War during a period of unchallengeable primacy.
Eastern Europe has been the historic gateway for Western attacks on Russia, including the bitter invasions by Napoleon and Hitler that are seared into that nation’s consciousness. Hence the critical role of buffer states as a protective shield.
On Feb. 9, 1990, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would expand “not one inch eastward.” Based on multiple similar assurances from Western leaders, former CIA director Robert Gates wrote, Gorbachev was “led to believe” that NATO’s eastward expansion “wouldn’t happen.” Making the mistake of assuming good faith behind the assurances, Gorbachev agreed to the peaceful reunification of West and East Germany and the unified state’s eventual NATO membership.
Other top officials, however, insisted that the U.S. priority was to see Russia collapse into “a third-rate power.” By 2004 NATO troops were “within spitting distance of Russia,” former U.K. Ambassador to Moscow Rodric Braithwaite said in the Financial Times on Feb. 2. In a retrospective analysis last August, Braithwaite wrote: “Russians believed they had been double-crossed. They were shocked by NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 — a foretaste, they feared, of what Russia itself might expect.”
Russians ridicule claims of NATO being purely defensive — which NATO member was attacked by Serbia in 1999? — and concluded that in 2014, Ukraine was transformed from a buffer for Russia into a barrier between it and Europe.
The bigger fear still, as Putin wrote in a long article last July, is that “Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game” by the West in order to turn it into “a springboard against Russia.” Hence Russia’s red line: no NATO membership for Ukraine, now or ever; and the related demand that NATO cut troop numbers in Eastern Europe. Else Moscow must think the unthinkable: regime change in Kiev into a more pro-Russian one or subjugation of Ukraine by force of arms.
To Western commentators the principle is non-negotiable that Ukraine as a sovereign state has the right to enter into security alliance with anyone else. In the eyes of Russians and Chinese officials, this is hypocrisy based in historical amnesia about the U.S. refusal to accept just such an exercise of sovereignty by Cuba in the 1962 missile crisis. The principle has also proven remarkably malleable in all the Western powers’ Taiwan policy where China has long exercised a veto over recognition, exchange of embassies and even Taiwan’s membership of international organizations.
Three other major episodes from recent international history are also relevant. In 1986 the World Court ruled for Nicaragua and against the U.S. for its campaign of destabilization of the Sandinista regime, but Washington simply dismissed the adverse ruling.
In 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush introduced the legal innovation of “unsigning” U.S. membership from the International Criminal Court. In 2018 President Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran — in which China and Russia had invested political capital — even though it had been negotiated by the previous U.S. administration and unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council. This made the U.S. an unreliable and untrustworthy great power with which to negotiate.
Let us not forget either how Beijing was shocked by the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999. Senior Chinese officials insisted to me back then that it was inconceivable that this could have been an accident and indeed, they were convinced that not just the embassy but the ambassador’s residence had been deliberately targeted. The conclusion drawn was that the existing norm of nonintervention, regarded by most countries as a peremptory norm from which no exception was permitted, had been violated by the U.S.-led NATO in the moment of Russia’s geopolitical weakness and vulnerability.
Moreover, the claim to an emerging new norm of “humanitarian intervention” by Western powers further showed they were using their geopolitical primacy to rewrite the rules of the international order regardless of other countries’ sensibilities and interests, even if the latter were in the majority.
I have also been present in intimate discussions after the international tribunal ruled against China in 2016 in the maritime dispute with the Philippines, when a top Chinese official remarked that the U.S. was not a party to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea but wanted to bind China by it. Maybe China should follow the U.S. example with the ICC and “unsign” UNCLOS, she said.
Most importantly, China must believe it cannot trust U.S. verbal promises to refrain from harmful action against core Chinese interests, nor the institutions designed to uphold and enforce international law. Washington has an unsavory record in weaponizing trade policy and abusing its dominance of international financial institutions to penalize those who refuse to kowtow to its diktats.
Claims to purely defensive motives notwithstanding, given the opportunity, Chinese leaders fear that not all future U.S. administrations will be able to resist the temptation to convert Taiwan into a launching pad for aggression against China. And, rather than be a mere rule breaker, China believes it must aim to become the preeminent rule maker and enforcer in a future Sino-centric global order.
That is the ultimate nightmare for Western countries. For the first time in several centuries, the global hegemon is poised to be a non-Western, non-English speaking, nondemocratic and noncapitalist civilization. There is little evidence thus far that the West can make the necessary psychological adjustment to learn to live in such a world.
To the West, Ukraine is a sovereign state that has the right to enter into a security alliance with anyone. In the eyes of Russia and China, this is hypocrisy based in historical amnesia.
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